The Absent-Minded Professor
''The Absent-Minded Professor ''is a 1961 American comic science fiction live-action family film produced by Walt Disney Productions and distributed by Buena Vista Distribution. It is based on the short story "A Situation of Gravity" by Samuel W. Taylor originally published in the May 22, 1943 issue of Liberty magazine. The title character was based in part on Hubert Alyea, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Princeton University, who was known as "Dr. Boom" for his explosive demonstrations. Directed by Robert Stevenson and produced by Bill Walsh, the film stars Fred MacMurray as Professor Ned Brainard. The film was a huge success at the box office, and two years later became the first Disney movie to have a sequel, 1963's Son of Flubber. The original 1961 film was one of the first Disney movies to be colourized (for the 1986 Home Video release), and, along with 1959's The Shaggy Dog ''and 1963's ''Son of Flubber, it is one of Disney's few black-and-white films to be produced after 1941. Plot Professor Brainard is an absent-minded professor of physical chemistry at Medfield College who invents a substance that gains energy when it strikes a hard surface. This discovery follows some blackboard scribbling in which he reserves a sign in the equation for enthalpy to energy plus pressure times volume. Brainard names his discovery Flubber, which is a portmanteau of "flying rubber". In the excitement of his discovery, he misses his own wedding to Betsy Carlisle, not for the first time, but his third. Subplots include another professor wooing the disappointed Miss Betsy Carlisle, Biff Hawk's ineligibility for basketball due to failing Brainard's class, Alonzo Hawk's schemes to gain wealth by means of Flubber, the school's financial difficulties and debt to Mr. Hawk, and Brainard's attempts to interest the government and military in uses for Flubber. Shelby Ashton, who was interested in Betsy, is given his revenge by the Professor, who keeps on jumping on the top of Shelby's car, until it crashes into a police car, where he is given a field sobriety test. Looking for backers, he bounces his Flubber ball for an audience, but his investment pitch proves so long-winded that most of the crowd has left before they notice that the ball bounced higher on its second bounce than on its first. For a more successful demonstration, he makes his Model T fly by bombarding Flubber with radioactive particles. Other adventures and misadventures result as Flubber is used on the bottoms of basketball players' shoes (in a crucial game) giving them tremendous jumping ability; Brainard (at a school dance) making him an accomplished dancer, and the scheming businessman Alonzo Hawk, who switches cars on the professor, with a car containing a squirrel and pigeons. Hawk then must be tackled by a full football team to bring him down after Brainard tricks him into testing Flubber on the bottom of his shoes. The Professor retrieves the old Model T from the warehouse, and Hawk is arrested for having a gun in his possession, when the car crashes into a police car. Eventually, Brainard shows his discovery to the government, after being scared by a missile in flight, and also wins back Miss Carlisle, culminating in a wedding at last. * David Lewis as General Singer * Jack Mullaney as Air Force Captain * Belle Montrose as Mrs. Chatsworth * Wally Brown as Coach Elkins * Wally Boag as TV Newsman * Don Ross as Lenny * Forrest Lewis as Officer Kelley * James Westerfield as Officer Hanson * Gage Clarke as Reverend Bosworth * Alan Hewitt as General Hotchkiss * Raymond Bailey as Admiral Olmstead * Ed Wynn as Fire Chief